Thursday, 19 April 2007

How to Go Completely Bananas

It's hardly surprising that I have once lived on a banana plantation - since the Canary Islands are famous for them - where these bananas were growing a few feet from the door. It was certainly an interesting experience, but one I only recommend to people who enjoy lots of dust and interminable swarms of flies that make it absolutely impossible to open windows, which is not great in sub-tropical heat.

Anyway, consequently, I often get an awful lot of bananas to eat ...

One problem single cooks come across frequently is the need to buy food in packs or quantities that are too large for single consumption, which can create a lot of waste or a lot of leftovers. But what would you do if you were given this many bananas for one - around 20 kilos of them, I'm guessing - as a gift?

My landlady, brought me all of these from her plantation. Well, I abhor waste, so for the last couple of weeks, I've been doing my level best to ensure that they have all been used or stored for later.

A local speciality and one which I frequently throw together is Arroz a la Cubana (Cuban Rice, which I have on authority, is never made in Cuba!) It's a perfect dish for using bananas that are slightly more ripe than I like for eating raw.

I can happily eat several bananas a day and have done so. (More on that later.) And, fortunately these bananas ripened gradually and not all at the same time.

For more ideas, I turned to the internet. Now, I'm willing to bet that you're highly unlikely to have that many bananas at once, ever, in your lives, but some of these links might come in handy and encourage you to buy whole bunches of bananas and enjoy them, rather than buying them in ones and twos to be able to use them before they become overripe.

With, perhaps the exception of the Banana and Popcorn Salad (ewwww) that Slashfood mentioned recently, the following links have information you can use on storing and using bananas, as well as banana recipes.

Suggest, "The easiest way is just to throw them in the freezer ... yep skins and all. When you are ready to use them for baking, just defrost, snip off the tip with scissors and squeeze out like toothpaste!"

Yes, it's fortunate that bananas are my favorite fruit - you could tell, huh? - and that the dog likes bananas too, but ... One warning: your mileage may vary, of course, but if you do ever have a large surfeit bananas, do please store them instead of trying to eat too many at once. My experience has been that, after an initial upturn in what we shall politely term "human waste production", the over consumption quickly provoked a case of "banana blockage".

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